This invention relates to vehicle mirrors and more particularly to auxiliary, convex, wide-angle, outside rearview mirrors for ready mounting on a vehicular rearview mirror without substantially blocking the vision therefrom.
It has long been recognized that rearview mirrors on cars and trucks provide, at best, but a limited field of view, that the "blind spot" areas not reflected in the mirrors are important to safety, and that some good remedy for that shortcoming of customary rearview mirrors should be found. The patent literature reflects much effort over the years directed towards the solution of the problem (see, e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,114,559, 2,582,651, 3,009,392, 3,146,296, 3,375,053, 3,588,233, 3,667,833, 4,345,819, 4,637,694, and Des. 231,520, as representative). See also my copending application, Ser. No. 07/207,522, filed 06/17/88. The principal prior commercial efforts to meet the need known to me, apart from the car-manufacturers' us of fairly large radius convex glass (often in the range of about 2 to 3 foot radius) in passenger-side mirrors, are the "bull's eye" convex mirrors designed to be glued directly to the face of the flat-glass mirror. These "bull's eye" glass mounted mirrors have met with some commercial success for application on the large-sized "West Coast" style truck mirrors where the area they obstruct is not a substantial percentage of the total area of the truck mirror, but for mirrors of the size currently provided on light trucks and vans, the convex mirrors for gluing onto the face of the flat glass must be unsatisfactorily small to avoid blocking an undue amount of the regular glass area, and have not proved to be a successful solution to the problem. I know of no prior art, adequate-sized, auxiliary, wide-angle outside rearview mirror which can be readily and simply nonobstructively mounted by the driver on the factory-supplied outside rearview mirror of current vehicles, and particularly light trucks and vans.